Category: Linux

On my last Slackware Linux installation attempt I faced a tricky situation. Everything went fine (with some exceptions at start) up until the time I had to install LILO. The symptom was that the installation simply hanged but otherwise the system was responding. The problem was in fact with LILO and my 3TB drive which was in /dev/sdb and was not the drive I was using for my root partition. This drive had a NTFS partition. If this is your case then do the following. Let Slackware finish the installation up until the part you need to install LILO. At this point exit the installation process (do not reboot!) and run

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mount/dev/sda1/mnt

mount-obind/dev/mnt/dev

mount-obind/proc/mnt/proc

mount-obind/sys/mnt/sys

chroot/mnt

I assume you are using /dev/sda1 as the partition you are installing Linux on, if not, then replace it with the appropriate one. Your root is now the same as if you had booted your new operating system. Now it is time to reconfigure LILO. For that open /etc/lilo.conf with your favorite console editor (vim, nano, etc). Add the following line to your lilo.conf file

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# /etc/lilo.conf

disk=/dev/sdb inaccessible

You can add each one of these lines for each drive you don’t want LILO to scan. For example, all drives which do not contain an operating system installed on them are good candidates to be flagged inaccessible. Now install lilo by running: